City of Irving launches smart waste pilot

The Texas city will use the Rubicon Smart City platform in a six-month programme to improve residential waste and recycling services for 240,000 residents.

Irving's smart city pilot is focusing on sustainability and customer service

The US city of Irving in Texas is rolling out a smart waste and recycling pilot programme using the Rubicon Smart City platform.

The six-month pilot will focus on bringing improvements in sustainability and customer service for more than 240,000 residents.

Route optimisation

The city has more than 40 collection vehicles that service approximately 42,000 locations. It is keen to generate data for route optimisation and management for its waste, recycling, and brush vehicles, as well as collecting data and documentation on the volume of material picked up for every route.

“The City of Irving continually is looking to take advantage of technology and data that helps improve efficiency, maintenance and makes the city better for our residents,” said Irving’s solid waste service director, Brenda Haney. “We think this specific smart city solution from Rubicon Global could be a game-changer for our fleet, and we look forward to exploring its impact and application throughout our system.”

The RubiconSmartCity platform has been rolled out in more than 30 cities across the US. It includes a smartphone loaded with the Rubicon application, as well as an on-board computer plug-in device. Both will be placed in the City of Irving’s collection vehicles. This technology will collect real-time service confirmations, provide GPS vehicle tracking, and enable documentation of any driver issues or the inability to successfully complete a pick-up.

“The City of Irving continually is looking to take advantage of technology and data that helps improve efficiency, maintenance and makes the city better for our residents”

The manager portal in RubiconSmartCity will collect all of the data and analytics and showcase to the city real time route updates, daily reporting, and operational insights.

“The platform helps cities of all sizes leverage data to make smarter decisions about waste, recycling, and city operations, leading to improvements in sustainability and quality of life that map to an overall mission to end waste,” said Michael Allegretti, chief public strategy officer at Rubicon Global.

“Using RubiconSmartCity, the City of Irving will be able to take the data that is pulled from its fleet and determine route optimisation, vehicle location, and streets that have been serviced— feeding important data back to the city and its citizens.”

Among the other US cities that are using the Rubicon platform are Atlanta, Columbus, Montgomery, Philadelphia and Spokane.

Rubicon’s mission is to end waste in all of its forms by helping its partners find economic value in their waste streams and be able to execute their sustainability goals.

The solution is also available on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) marketplace and the HGACBuy consortium.